Senior directors at RBS have been strongly criticised for giving misleading
evidence to MPs investigating claims that the bank mistreated small firms

Senior executives at the Royal Bank of Scotland have been accused of being “wilfully obtuse” in answering MPs questions about the alleged mis-treatment of the bank’s small business clients.

Andrew Tyrie, chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, has said he is writing to Sir Philip Hampton, chairman of the state-controlled bank, to complain about the evidence given by Chris Sullivan, deputy chief executive of RBS, and Derek Sach, head of the bank’s Global Restructuring Group (GRG) in June.

“If this is how RBS deals with a parliamentary Committee, how much can customers and regulators rely on it to be straightforward with them?” Mr Tyrie said in a statement. “I will be writing to the Chairman of RBS about this, and the Committee will report on it after the summer.”

The executives were originally summoned by the MPs to answer a number of allegations about the treatment of small firms by GRG contained in two highly critical reports on RBS.

One report by Lawrence Tomlinson, a Government adviser, alleged that the bank’s GRG division was forcing small businesses into administration so that the bank could take their properties and sell them for a profit.

Another report by Sir Andrew Large concluded that there were potential conflicts of interest between GRG and its small business clients because the division was an “internal profit centre”. The former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England argued that GRG could be tempted to drive profits from clients rather than help them and turn them around, as the division was designed to do.

But giving evidence to MPs, RBS bosses repeatedly insisted that GRG was not a “profit centre”. RBS “decided to contest the term in evidence to the Committee, not only in a written statement in February, but also repeatedly in its public hearing in June,” Mr Tyrie said.

However, in a letter to Mr Tyrie, Mr Sullivan, who is leaving RBS next year, said he had to “correct the statement he made to the Committee” since he now agreed that GRG was indeed a profit centre.

In a statement today, Mr Tyrie has said: “Following the Committee’s decision to write to Sir Andrew Large for clarification, RBS has now offered the Committee what it euphemistically describes as ‘additional comments’. In fact, they have done a belated U-turn. It’s not as if the facts have changed. So it now appears that RBS has been wilfully obtuse with the Committee.”